A story in yesterday’s BoingBoing blog details Worldwide Lexicon – a community translation system that enables a website’s readers to translate to the languages they speak.

WWL is an open source project, and is developing a suite of tools to enable websites and blogs to go multilingual, using a combination of machine translation, volunteers (readers) and professional translators. The project’s goal is to eliminate the language barrier for interesting content by making it easy for people to form translation communities and services around topics, websites or languages. They will be releasing a professional translation hub, under the New BSD license, in early summer. If you’re interested in contributing code to the project, or in helping localize the interface to more languages, contact Brian McConnell (brian@worldwidelexicon.org)

Boing Boing itself is testing the service at http://boingboing.dermundo.com/